cuff and snap and snarl were fast and furious, they would break off
suddenly and stand several feet apart, glaring at each other. And
then, just as suddenly, like the sun rising on a stormy sea, they
would begin to laugh. This would always culminate with the master's
arms going around White Fang's neck and shoulders while the latter
crooned and growled his love-song.
But nobody else ever romped with White Fang. He did not permit it.
He stood on his dignity, and when they attempted it, his warning snarl
and bristling mane were anything but playful. That he allowed the
master these liberties was no reason that he should be a common dog,
loving here and loving there, everybody's property for a romp and good
time. He loved with single heart and refused to cheapen himself or his
love.
The master went out on horseback a great deal, and to accompany
him was one of White Fang's chief duties in life. In the Northland
he had evidenced his fealty by toiling in the harness; but there
were no sleds in the Southland, nor did dogs pack burdens on their
backs. So he rendered fealty in the new way, by running with the
master's horse. The longest day never played White Fang out. His was
the gait of the wolf, smooth, tireless, and effortless, and at the end
of fifty miles he would come in jauntily ahead of the horse.
It was in connection with the riding, that White Fang achieved one
other mode of expression- remarkable in that he did it but twice in
all his life. The first time occurred when the master was trying to
teach a spirited thoroughbred the method of opening and closing
gates without the rider's dismounting. Time and again and many times
he ranged the horse up to the gate in the effort to close it, and each
time the horse became frightened and backed and plunged away. It
grew more nervous and excited every moment. When it reared, the master
put the spurs to it and made it drop its forelegs back to earth,
whereupon it would begin kicking with its hind-legs. White Fang
watched the performance with increasing anxiety until he could contain
himself no longer, when he sprang in front of the horse and barked
savagely and warningly.
Though he often tried to bark thereafter, and the master
encouraged him, he succeeded only once, and then it was not in the
master's presence. A scamper across the pasture, a jackrabbit rising
suddenly under the horse's feet, a violent sheer, a stumble, a fall to
earth, and a broken leg for the master were the cause of it. White
Fang sprang in a rage at the throat of the offending horse, but was
checked by the master's voice.
'Home! Go home!' the master commanded, when he had ascertained his
injury.
White Fang was disinclined to desert him. The master thought of
writing a note, but searched his pockets vainly for pencil and
paper. Again he commanded White Fang to go home.
The latter regarded him wistfully, started away, then returned and
whined softly. The master talked to him gently but seriously, and he
cocked his ears and listened with painful intentness.
'That's all right, old fellow, you just run along home,' ran the
talk. 'Go on home and tell them what's happened to me. Home with
you, you wolf. Get along home!'
White Fang knew the meaning of 'home,' and though he did not
understand the remainder of the master's language, he knew it was
his will that he should go home. He turned and trotted reluctantly
away. Then he stopped, undecided, and looked back over his shoulder.
'Go home!' came the sharp command, and this time he obeyed.
The family was on the porch, taking the cool of the afternoon,
when White Fang arrived. He came in among them, panting, covered
with dust.
'Weedon's back,' Weedon's mother announced.
The children welcomed White Fang with glad cries and ran to meet
him. He avoided them and passed down the porch, but they cornered
him against a rocking-chair and the railing. He growled and tried to
push by them. Their mother looked apprehensively in their direction.
'I confess, he makes me nervous around the children,' she said. 'I
have a dread that he will turn upon them unexpectedly some day.'
Growling savagely, White Fang sprang out of the corner,
overturning the boy and the girl. The mother called them to her and
comforted them, telling them not to bother White Fang.
'A wolf is a wolf,' commented Judge Scott. 'There is no trusting
one.'
'But he is not all wolf,' interposed Beth, standing for her
brother in his absence.
'You have only Weedon's opinion for that,' rejoined the Judge. 'He
merely surmises that there is some strain of dog in White Fang; but as
he will tell you himself, he knows nothing about it. As for his
appearance-'
He did not finish the sentence. White Fang stood before him,
growling fiercely.
'Go away! Lie down, sir!' Judge Scott commanded.
White Fang turned to the love-master's wife. She screamed with
fright as he seized her dress in his teeth and dragged on it till
the frail fabric tore away. By this time he had become the center of
interest. He had ceased from his growling and stood, head up,
looking into their faces. His throat worked spasmodically, but made no
sound, while he struggled with all his body, convulsed with the effort
to rid himself of the incommunicable something that strained for
utterance.
'I hope he is not going mad,' said Weedon's mother. 'I told Weedon
that I was afraid the warm climate would not agree with an Arctic
animal.'
'He's trying to speak, I do believe,' Beth announced.
At this moment speech came to White Fang, rushing up in a great
burst of barking.
'Something has happened to Weedon,' his wife said decisively.
They were all on their feet, now, and White Fang ran down the steps,
looking back for them to follow. For the second and last time in his
life he had barked and made himself understood.
After this event he found a warmer place in the hearts of Sierra
Vista people, and even the groom whose arm he had slashed admitted
that he was a wise dog even if he was a wolf. Judge Scott still held
to the same opinion, and proved it to everybody's dissatisfaction by
measurements and descriptions taken from the encyclopedia and
various works on natural history.
The days came and went, streaming their unbroken sunshine over the
Santa Clara Valley. But as they grew shorter and White Fang's second
winter in the Southland came on, he made a strange discovery. Collie's
teeth were no longer sharp. There was a playfulness about her nips and
a gentleness that prevented them from really hurting him. He forgot
that she had made life a burden to him, and when she disported herself
around him he responded solemnly, striving to be playful and
becoming no more than ridiculous.
One day she led him off on a long chase through the back-pasture and
into the woods. It was the afternoon that the master was to ride,
and White Fang knew it. The horse stood saddled and waiting at the
door. White Fang hesitated. But there was that in him deeper than
all the law he had learned, than the customs that had moulded him,
than his love for the master, than the very will to live of himself;
and when, in the moment of his indecision, Collie nipped him and
scampered off, he turned and followed after. The master rode alone
that day; and in the woods, side by side, White Fang ran with
Collie, as his mother, Kiche, and old One Eye had run long years
before in the silent Northland forest.
CHAPTER_FIVE
CHAPTER FIVE.
The Sleeping Wolf.
-
IT WAS ABOUT THIS TIME that the newspapers were full of the daring
escape of a convict from San Quentin prison. He was a ferocious man.
He had been ill-made in the making. He had not been born right, and he
had not been helped any by the moulding he had received at the hands
of society. The hands of society are harsh, and this man was a
striking sample of its handiwork. He was a beast- a human beast, it is
true, but nevertheless so terrible a beast that he can best be
characterized as carnivorous.
In San Quentin prison he had proved incorrigible. Punishment
failed to break his spirit. He could die dumb-mad and fighting to
the last, but he could not live and be beaten. The more fiercely he
fought, the more harshly society handled him, and the only effect of
harshness was to make him fiercer. Strait-jackets, starvation, and
beatings and clubbings were the wrong treatment for Jim Hall; but it
was the treatment he received. It was the treatment he had received
from the time he was a little pulpy boy in a San Francisco slum-
soft clay in the hands of society and ready to be formed into
something.
It was during Jim Hall's third term in prison that he encountered
a guard that was almost as great a beast as he. The guard treated
him unfairly, lied about him to the warden, lost him his credits,
persecuted him. The difference between them was that the guard carried
a bunch of keys and a revolver. Jim Hall had only his naked hands
and his teeth. But he sprang upon the guard one day and used his teeth
on the other's throat just like any jungle animal.
After this, Jim Hall went to live in the incorrigible cell. He lived
there three years. The cell was of iron, the floor, the walls, the
roof. He never left his cell. He never saw the sky nor the sunshine.
Day was a twilight and night was a black silence. He was in an iron
tomb, buried alive. He saw no human thing. When his food was shoved in
to him, he growled like a wild animal. He hated all things. For days
and nights he bellowed his rage at the universe. For weeks and
months he never made a sound, in the black silence eating his very
soul. He was a man and a monstrosity, as fearful a thing of fear as
ever gibbered in the visions of a maddened brain.
And then, one night, he escaped. The warden said it was
impossible, but nevertheless the cell was empty, and half in half
out of it lay the body of a dead guard. Two other dead guards marked
his trail through the prison to the outer walls, and he had killed
with his hands to avoid noise.
He was armed with the weapons of the slain guards- a live arsenal
that fled through the hills pursued by the organized might of society.
A heavy price of gold was upon his head. Avaricious farmers hunted him
with shotguns. His blood might pay off a mortgage or send a son to
college. Public-spirited citizens took down their rifles and went
out after him. A pack of bloodhounds followed the way of his
bleeding feet. And the sleuth-hounds of the laws, the paid fighting
animals of society, with telephone, and telegraph, and special
train, clung to his trail night and day.
Sometimes they came upon him, and men faced him like heroes, or
stampeded through barb-wire fences to the delight of the
commonwealth reading the account at the breakfast table. It was
after such encounters that the dead and wounded were carted back to
the towns, and their places filled by men eager for the manhunt.
And then Jim Hall disappeared. The bloodhounds vainly quested on the
lost trail. Inoffensive ranchers in remote valleys were held up by
armed men and compelled to identify themselves; while the remains of
Jim Hall were discovered on a dozen mountainsides by greedy
claimants for blood-money.
In the meantime the newspapers were read at Sierra Vista, not so
much with interest as with anxiety. The women were afraid, Judge Scott
pooh-poohed and laughed, but not with reason, for it was in his last
days on the bench that Jim Hall had stood before him and received
sentence. And in open courtroom, before all men, Jim Hall had
proclaimed that the day would come when he would wreak vengeance on
the Judge that sentenced him.
For once, Jim Hall was right. He was innocent of the crime for which
he was sentenced. It was a case, in the parlance of thieves and
police, of 'railroading'. Jim Hall was being 'railroaded' to prison
for a crime he had not committed. Because of the two prior convictions
against him, Judge Scott imposed upon him a sentence of fifty years.
Judge Scott did not know all things, and he did not know that he was
party to a police conspiracy, that the evidence was hatched and
perjured, that Jim Hall was guiltless of the crime charged. And Jim
Hall, on the other hand, did not know that Judge Scott was merely
ignorant. Jim Hall believed that the Judge knew all about it and was
hand in glove with the police in the perpetration of the monstrous
injustice. So it was, when the doom of fifty years of living death was
uttered by Judge Scott, that Jim Hall, hating all things in the
society that misused him, rose up and raged in the courtroom until
dragged down by half a dozen of his blue-coated enemies. To him, Judge
Scott was the keystone in the arch of injustice, and upon Judge
Scott he emptied the vials of his wrath and hurled the threats of
his revenge yet to come. Then Jim Hall went to his living death... and
escaped.
Of all this White Fang knew nothing. But between him and Alice,
the master's wife, there existed a secret. Each night, after Sierra
Vista had gone to bed, she arose and let in White Fang to sleep in the
big hall. Now White Fang was not a house-dog, nor was he permitted
to sleep in the house; so each morning, early, she slipped down and
let him out before the family was awake.
On one such night, while all the house slept, White Fang awoke and
lay very quietly. And very quietly he smelled the air and read the
message it bore of a strange god's presence. And to his ears came
sounds of the strange god's movements. White Fang burst into no
furious outcry. It was not his way. The strange god walked softly, but
more softly walked White Fang, for he had no clothes to rub against
the flesh of his body. He followed silently. In the Wild he had hunted
live meat that was infinitely timid, and he knew the advantage of
surprise.
The strange god paused at the foot of the great staircase and
listened, and White Fang was as dead, so without movement was he as he
watched and waited. Up that staircase the way led to the love-master
and to the love-master's dearest possessions. White Fang bristled, but
waited. The strange god's foot lifted. He was beginning the ascent.
Then it was that White Fang struck. He gave no warning, with no
snarl anticipated his own action. Into the air he lifted his body in
the spring that landed him on the strange god's back. White Fang clung
with his forepaws to the man's shoulders, at the same time burying his
fangs into the back of the man's neck. He clung on for a moment,
long enough to drag the god over backward. Together they crashed to
the floor. White Fang leaped clear, and, as the man struggled to rise,
was in again with the slashing fangs.
Sierra Vista awoke in alarm. The noise from downstairs was as that
of a score of battling fiends. There were revolver shots. A man's
voice screamed once in horror and anguish. There was a great
snarling and growling, and over all arose a smashing and crashing of
furniture and glass.
But almost as quickly as it had arisen, the commotion died away. The
struggle had not lasted more than three minutes. The frightened
household clustered at the top of the stairway. From below, as from
out an abyss of blackness, came up a gurgling sound, as of air
bubbling through water. Sometimes this gurgle became sibilant,
almost a whistle. But this, too, quickly died down and ceased. Then
naught came up out of the blackness save a heavy panting of some
creature struggling sorely for air.
Weedon Scott pressed a button, and the staircase and downstairs hall
were flooded with light. Then he and Judge Scott, revolvers in hand,
cautiously descended. There was no need for this caution. White Fang
had done his work. In the midst of the wreckage of overthrown and
smashed furniture, partly on his side, his face hidden by an arm,
lay a man. Weedon Scott bent over, removed the arm, and turned the
man's face upward. A gaping throat explained the manner of his death.
'Jim Hall,' said Judge Scott, and father and son looked
significantly at each other.
Then they turned to White Fang. He, too, was lying on his side.
His eyes were closed, but the lids slightly lifted in an effort to
look at them as they bent over him, and the tail was perceptibly
agitated in a vain effort to wag. Weedon Scott patted him, and his
throat rumbled an acknowledging growl. But it was a weak growl at
best, and it quickly ceased. His eyelids dropped and went shut, and
his whole body seemed to relax and flatten out upon the floor.
'He's all in, poor devil,' muttered the master.
'We'll see about that,' asserted the Judge, as he started for the
telephone.
'Frankly, he has one chance in a thousand,' announced the surgeon,
after he had worked an hour and a half on White Fang.
Dawn was breaking through the windows and dimming the electric
lights. With the exception of the children, the whole family was
gathered about the surgeon to hear his verdict.
'One broken hind-leg,' he went on. 'Three broken ribs, one at
least of which has pierced the lungs. He has lost nearly all the blood
in his body. There is a large likelihood of internal injuries. He must
have been jumped upon. To say nothing of three bullet holes clear
through him. One chance in a thousand is really optimistic. He
hasn't a chance in ten thousand.'
'But he mustn't lose any chance that might be of help to him,' Judge
Scott exclaimed. 'Never mind expense. Put him under the X-ray-
anything. Weedon, telegraph at once to San Francisco for Doctor
Nichols. No reflection on you, doctor, you understand; but he must
have the advantage of every chance.'
The surgeon smiled indulgently. 'Of course I understand. He deserves
all that can be done for him. He must be nursed as you would nurse a
human being, a sick child. And don't forget what I told you about
temperature. I'll be back at ten o'clock again.'
White Fang received the nursing. Judge Scott's suggestion of a
trained nurse was indignantly clamored down by the girls, who
themselves undertook the task. And White Fang won out on the one
chance in ten thousand denied him by the surgeon.
The latter was not to be censured for his misjudgment. All his
life he had tended and operated on the soft humans of civilization,
who lived sheltered lives and had descended out of many sheltered
generations. Compared with White Fang, they were frail and flabby, and
clutched life without any strength in their grip. White Fang had
come straight from the Wild, where the weak perish early and shelter
is vouchsafed to none. In neither his father nor his mother was
there any weakness, nor in the generations before them. A constitution
of iron and the vitality of the Wild were White Fang's inheritance,
and he clung to life, the whole of him and every part of him, in
spirit and in flesh, with the tenacity that of old belonged to all
creatures.
Bound down a prisoner, denied even movement by the plaster casts and
bandages, White Fang lingered out the weeks. He slept long hours and
dreamed much, and through his mind passed an unending pageant of
Northland visions. All the ghosts of the past arose and were with him.
Once again he lived in the lair with Kiche, crept trembling to the
knees of Gray Beaver to tender his allegiance, ran for his life before
Lip-lip and all the howling bedlam of the puppy-pack.
He ran again through the silence, hunting his living food through
the months of famine; and again he ran at the head of the team, the
gut-whips of Mit-sah and Gray Beaver snapping behind, their voices
crying 'Raa! Raa!' when they came to a narrow passage and the team
closed together like a fan to go through. He lived again all his
days with Beauty Smith and the fights he had fought. At such times
he whimpered and snarled in his sleep and they that looked on said
that his dreams were bad.
But there was one particular nightmare from which he suffered- the
clanking, clanging monsters of electric cars that were to him colossal
screaming lynxes. He would lie in a screen of bushes, watching for a
squirrel to venture far enough out on the ground from its tree-refuge.
Then, when he sprang out upon it, it would transform itself into an
electric car, menacing and terrible, towering over him like a
mountain, screaming and clanging and spitting fire at him. It was
the same when he challenged the hawk down out of the sky. Down out
of the blue it would rush, as it dropped upon him changing itself into
the ubiquitous electric car. Or again, he would be in the pen of
Beauty Smith. Outside the pen, men would be gathering, and he knew
that a fight was on. He watched the door for his antagonist to
enter. The door would open, and thrust in upon him would come the
awful electric car. A thousand times this occurred, and each time
the terror it inspired was as vivid and as great as ever.
Then came the day when the last bandage and the last plaster cast
were taken off. It was a gala day. All Sierra Vista was gathered
around. The master rubbed his ears, and he crooned his love-growl. The
master's wife called him the 'Blessed Wolf,' which name was taken up
with acclaim and all the women called him the Blessed Wolf.
He tried to rise to his feet, and after several attempts fell down
from weakness. He had lain so long that his muscles had gone out of
them. He felt a little shame because of his weakness, as though,
forsooth, he was failing the gods in the service he owed them. Because
of this he made heroic efforts to arise, and at last he stood on his
four legs, tottering and swaying back and forth.
'The Blessed Wolf!' chorused the women.
Judge Scott surveyed them triumphantly.
'Out of your own mouths be it,' he said. 'Just as I contended
right along. No mere dog could have done what he did. He's a wolf.'
'A Blessed Wolf,' amended the Judge's wife.
'Yes, Blessed Wolf,' agreed the Judge. 'And henceforth that shall be
my name for him.'
'He'll have to learn to walk again,' said the surgeon; 'so he
might as well start in right now. It won't hurt him. Take him
outside.'
And outside he went, like a king, with all Sierra Vista about him
and tending on him. He was very weak, and when he reached the lawn
he lay down and rested for a while.
Then the procession started on, little spurts of strength coming
into White Fang's muscles as he used them and the blood began to surge
through them. The stables were reached, and there in the doorway lay
Collie, a half-dozen pudgy puppies playing about her in the sun.
White Fang looked on with a wondering eye.
Collie snarled warningly at him, and he was careful to keep his
distance. The master with his toe helped one sprawling puppy toward
him. He bristled suspiciously, but the master warned him that all
was well. Collie, clasped in the arms of one of the women, watched him
jealously and with a snarl warned him that all was not well.
The puppy sprawled in front of him. He cocked his ears and watched
it curiously. Then their noses touched, and he felt the warm little
tongue of the puppy on his jowl. White Fang's tongue went out, he knew
not why, and he licked the puppy's face.
Hand-clapping and pleased cries from the gods greeted the
performance. He was surprised, and looked at them in a puzzled way.
Then his weakness asserted itself, and he lay down, his ears cocked,
his head on one side, as he watched the puppy. The other puppies
came sprawling toward him, to Collie's great disgust; and he gravely
permitted them to clamber and tumble over him. At first, amid the
applause of the gods, he betrayed a trifle of his old
self-consciousness and awkwardness. This passed away as the puppies'
antics and mauling continued, and he lay with half-shut, patient eyes,
drowsing in the sun.
-
THE END
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